1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method for producing an electro-optical device. In addition, the invention further relates to an apparatus for producing an electro-optical device.
2. Related Art
As described in JP-A-2002-107740, a one drop fill (ODF) method is known in the technical field pertaining to the invention as a process for manufacturing a liquid crystal display, which is an example of a variety of electro-optical devices. In the ODF method, a liquid crystal material is dropped on an element substrate (or, more exactly, an uncut substrate). After dropping of the liquid crystal material thereon, the element substrate and a counter substrate are adhered to each other via a sealant that is provided in the form of a frame. In this way, liquid crystal is sealed inside a space demarcated by the element substrate, the counter substrate, and the frame-pattern sealant. Typically, in the ODF process, the element substrate and the counter substrate are joined to each other before cutting thereof. That is, at this manufacturing stage, each of the element substrate and the counter substrate that has various kinds of constituent elements, layers, and the like formed thereon has not yet cut up into individual displays. Therefore, after the adhesion process, it is necessary to remove a regional part of the counter substrate that covers a terminal region of the element substrate so that the terminal region of the element substrate is exposed. In order to remove the regional part of the counter substrate for the purpose described above, the counter substrate is subjected to scribe-and-break processing. Then, after separation of the removal target region from the remaining region of the counter substrate as a result of the scribe-and-break processing, the target region, that is, a portion of the counter substrate that covers the terminal region of the element substrate, is removed manually in the typical method of the related art.
Disadvantageously, however, such a manual removal method has a risk of damaging the terminal region of the element substrate because, at the time of manual removal of the target region, the target region might, for example, scratch the terminal region of the element substrate due to an ultra-short distance between the element substrate and the counter substrate, which is a few micrometers or so.